


Collimate

by Polly_Lynn



Category: Castle (TV 2009)
Genre: Angst, Childhood Trauma, F/M, Flirting, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Healing, Injury Recovery, Light Angst, Memory Loss, Memory Related, Partners to Lovers, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, Recovery, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-19
Updated: 2020-03-19
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:21:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23211682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: Time has been moving strangely this last month or so. A month and just a little more. It’s almost unbelievable to him, after the eternity of the summer, that she’s been back in his life for so short a time.
Relationships: Kate Beckett & Richard Castle, Kate Beckett/Richard Castle
Comments: 4
Kudos: 14





	Collimate

Time has been moving strangely this last month or so. A _month_ and just a little more. It’s almost unbelievable to him, after the eternity of the summer, that she’s been back in his life for so short a time. 

It’s not that it feels like life is moving more quickly. Not at all. There are days when he sees how beat up her body still is, and days when she is still so quiet and cautious and sad. And there are days when the anger and hurt well up in him and he feels every one of the days she left him alone to think, over and over, about her dying in that ambulance. When it’s one of those days, it feels like time is crawling. 

And then there are days when she is _outrageous._ She strides through every moment with confidence, and the way she flirts, the way she fixes him with longing looks and doesn’t avert her gaze one millimeter … It’s outrageous. And those days, he feels so close to her—he feels like they’ve made such tremendous progress toward where he’s always known they’d end up—that it feels like years have passed and all the losses they’ve suffered are a distant memory. 

It goes in fits and starts, that’s what time’s been doing this last month or so. In the strange case of Jack Sinclair, time is drawing more from Column B, though. 

He’s delighted by every detail of the case, from its promising “reality show” start through the development of its creepy, historic New York street cred. She is definitely _not_ delighted by even _one_ detail of the case, but she more or less openly thinks _his_ delight is cute. Even when he stays up all night, nerding out, then accidentally drinks the coffee he’d brought her, the murderous glare she shoots him still says she thinks he’s more than cute. The murderous glare says that she’s pretty far gone. 

And things just keep getting better and better as the case wears on. 

He drops by her apartment to ask her on a ghost-hunting date, like it’s no big deal, and she says yes, like it’s no big deal. She rolls her eyes like crazy, but she indulges him with the appropriate catch phrase with hardly any prompting at all. And then she flat out _teases_ him with a drawn-out ghost story that’s theatrical enough that his mother would be proud if she were around. But his mother is definitely _not_ around, because this is a ghost hunting date. 

And like any good date, it comes with its share of close contact. There’s the mostly accidental butt grab, and then there’s the missed opportunity as they crawl through the bowels of the McClaren house. She thinks he’s embarked an impromptu massage. She is so stunningly nonchalant about the possibility that he has been so bold as to begin _an impromptu massage_ without so much as a _Gee, Kate, it looks like the ghost that is_ obviously _responsible for these murders is making you really tense,_ that he’s kicking himself for _not_ being so bold. He’s kicking himself for not totally going for it on the impromptu massage front. 

It’s not all wine and roses and mostly accidental butt grabs, though. 

There’s an uninvited hug from a vintage dead guy that is on the _not delightful_ side. And if there had been a girly scream—which there definitely was not—that would have also been not especially delightful. Except that it gives her something to tease him about. It gives her an excuse—not that she seems to need much of one lately—to bump his shoulder with hers and imitate the girly scream that definitely didn’t happen, and even if it did, it had to have emanated from their insubstantial murder suspect. It gives _him_ an excuse to openly think it’s cute the way she teases him. 

And then things turn serious. They turn a little painful in Pete Benton’s office when the man summons up every detail from a night twenty years ago. 

_When something like that happens, it’s burned into your brain._

It plays with time. It summons up the long summer, the last miserable moments between them. 

_Do you mind if we don’t?_

It’s raw and awful, and he goes into retreat mode. He’s about to, but glances her way and there’s a moment of clarity. He doesn’t know if she remembers his graveyard confession. He thinks she does, he thinks she doesn’t. Both are true at the same time. 

But in that moment, there is the possibility—not the certainty, but the _possibility—_ that it doesn’t matter. Whether she does or whether she doesn’t remember, she has lost that time, too. She has spent those months in who knows how many kinds of pain and he feels a swell of absolute compassion for her, and time surges forward again. 

He likes that moment in Pete Benton’s office. It’s far from delightful, and he certainly doesn’t love it, but he _likes_ the way it’s made him pick up the looming question and turn it a different way. He likes the depth and solidity it brings to the way things are between them. 

It gives him memory back, that moment. It’s a strange thing to think, but it really does. He has been dwelling on the surface of things and looking ever forward. He has been reluctant to dip into the well of memory and now … he simply isn’t. Now he is falling suddenly into a wide open past. Deep time is speeding toward him, filling his field of view entirely, and he wants to tell her about it. 

But they have a case to solve first. And they do solve it, soon enough—with Jack Sinclair’s ghostly help, he’s sure, and he gets her to concede that’s possible. It brings them right back around to the right kind of day. 

He makes a decision on the elevator ride down. The past is still rushing up to meet him, and he wants to share. He wants to tell her _the_ story. Hollander’s Woods. Everything. The similarities to Jack Sinclair’s story are just too uncanny. Violence, repression, a career-making experience. 

It’s the defining story of his life, and he wants to tell her. He wheels around to face her, out on the street. It’s warm for October, but there’s a stirring breeze that makes her huddle into her jacket. 

It changes his mind. He sees her in moonlight, and _she_ changes his mind, the way she’s been changing it every second of his life since he met her.

She is the defining story of his life. _She_ is. 

So he doesn’t tell her about Hollander’s Woods or his childish scrawl on furry, lined paper he had torn out of a notebook. He doesn’t tell her about the body or the pay phone or how long it took for the fear of the man in the mask to subside, even a little. 

_Another time,_ he thinks as he sees her in moonlight with the wind stirring her hair. He’ll tell her another time, because it’s really a bed time story, anyway. 

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: This has nothing to do with anything, other than the fact that I am too restless and worried and in pain to do anything reasonable like go to bed, and getting this show and these characters out of my head is proving way too much for me at the moment. Feh. 


End file.
